I enabled the “topic featured link enabled” setting, but I can’t quite figure out what this is supposed to do. I can see that when I create a new topic, the “Topic” field says “… or paste a link”. However, when I actually do that, the topic simply has the actual link for a title, which is hardly readable - and furthermore, the link is not navigable. I was assuming that this would be more involved, e.g. fetching the page and determining its actual title, and using that for the title of the topic, while also providing an icon or button to navigate to the link. Am I missing something?
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You can read our 1.7 blog entry about the release for a demo video.
Same doubt here 
This is the blog post?
Featured link is about “Start Topic With a Link” ?
Yes. The short answer is that if nothing special happens when you try to use a link as topic, then the target website doesn’t support whatever magic sauce is needed to fetch the data. Facebook seems to be using the same thing, so if your link doesn’t show anything but the link itself when you paste it in a Facebook post, then it will do the same on Discourse.
Try a link to e.g. Wikipedia to see what it is supposed to look like.
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And that magic sauce is called Open Graph, right?
This is the original discussion:
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